Government of India in recent past took a number of proactive initiatives in the form of changes in policies, institutions and management mechanisms to address the problem of municipal solid waste management. Despite these changes, results are believed to be less than expected ones. Increasing economic growth is bound to generate more wastes and managing these wastes needs both budgetary and technical resources. In view of scarcity of resources, there is thus a need for a paradigm shift in the approach to solid waste management in India. Among other things, this requires a thorough and dispassionate understanding of the gravity of the situation and a critical diagnosis of the response measures. Though underlying issues are to a large extent same across continents, countries, cities and municipalities, yet some issues are specific in this context. Thus, both commonalities and specificities have to be discerned and analyzed. It is against this background that the present paper is designed to present an overview of the existing municipal solid waste management practices from the global to national and national to local level perspectives in reference to the Indian cities. Particular emphasis has also been laid on to assess the overall solid waste generation and management services practiced by the Indian municipalities. Besides these, various legal, institutional and policy issues relating to urban solid waste management in the Indian context have also been reviewed to strengthen the argument in favour of the need for efficient solid waste management services for the Indian cities. It can be observed from the literature review that despite a number of positive initiatives taken by India in recent years, the state of the urban solid waste management is still far from a satisfactory level and there is thus an urgent need to address the issue by involving residents, private sector players and non-governmental organizations along with civic authorities.

RBI, Handbook of the Statistics of the Indian Economy 2013-14, Research Bank of India (RBI), online access: http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/000HSE13120914FL.pdf accessed on 5 October 2014.

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The World Bank, “What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management”, Urban Development Series Knowledge Paper No. 68135, the World Bank, USA, 2012.